Monday, February 04, 2013

The myth of Palestinian innocence

The Mufti meets Adolph Hitler - November 1941The Palestinian leadership's complicity with Nazism, and their role in incitement against and ethnic cleansing of the Jews of the Arab world, has been obfuscated. Time to explode the myth of Palestinian innocence, says Lyn Julius in her Times of Israel blog.

When people learn about the Jewish expulsion,
they usually respond with sympathy. Jews from Arab countries are
entitled to recognition and redress, they acknowledge.

But that recognition and redress must come from Arab countries, they say.

Indeed, one of the most enduring myths is that
Palestinians bear no responsibility for the exodus of the Jews from 10
Arab countries. The Palestinians are innocent of any wrongdoing.

Regrettably, that position is borne of
ignorance and wishful thinking. From the outset, the Palestinian cause
was a pan-Arab nationalist cause. It has also a powerful Islamist
dimension: Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood do not aim to set up a
Palestinian state, so much as reclaim Islamic wakf land from the Jews. From an early stage the campaign for Palestine took on an antisemitic hue. If the Fatah and Hamas unity deal lasts, there will be nothing to choose between nationalist and religious rejectionism of a sovereign Jewish state.

Yet the role of the Palestinian Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in inciting anti-Jewish hatred and
violence as early as the 1920s and 30s, is incontrovertible. Not only
did the Mufti instigate deadly disturbances in Palestine in 1920 and
1929, it is well known that the riots which led to the murders of 133
Jews in Hebron and Safed were sparked by the lie that the Al-Aqsa mosque was in danger.

Wherever the Mufti went in the Arab world, persecution and mayhem followed against the local Jews.

In December 1931, the Mufti held a World
Islamic Congress in Jerusalem. An Iraqi delegate remarked, “If the Jews
carry on we will have no choice but to treat the Jews in the only way
they know.”

“The only way they know” meant that Jews should be treated as submissive dhimmis,
inferior to Muslims and at their total mercy. Following pressure from
the Western powers on the Ottoman empire in the 19th century, dhimmitude
had been largely abolished. But in 1921, Yemenite Jews claim it was due
to Palestinian pressure that the decree forcing Jewish orphans to
convert to Islam was reinstated. It happened after a Palestinian
delegation had visited Yemen to demand that the Imam stop all
immigration to Palestine. The Orphans’ Decree, argues scholar SD Goiten,
was the single most important reason why Jews were desperate to flee Yemen.

From 1931 on, the Mufti ceased to speak of
Zionists but Jews. All Arabs were exhorted to treat the Jews of their
countries ‘as the Jews treat the Arabs of Palestine’.

The congress was followed by violence in
Morocco – in Casablanca in 1932, Casablanca and Rabat in 1933, Rabat and
Meknes in 1937 and Meknes in 1939. In Tunisia, an entente between
Tunisian nationalists and the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee sparked
violence in Sfax in 1932. All this well before the creation of the state
of Israel.

British reports noted the intense propaganda
in Yemen. Jewish refugees tried to make for British-controlled Aden. In
1939, a crowd was incited against the British and the Jews when they
were shown fabricated photographs of Arab children hanging from
telegraph poles. Other newspapers mendaciously reported that thousands
of Arabs had been killed and bombs thrown at the Muslim holy places in
Jerusalem.

But the worst incitement, with the deadliest
consequences of all, took place in Iraq: In 1939, Palestinian teachers
expelled by the British to Baghdad together with the Mufti, along with
Syrian and Lebanese emigres, played a key role fanning the flames of
Jew-hatred with false propaganda. The Mufti himself plotted a pro-Nazi
coup to overthrow the pro-British government. With the British army at
the gates of Baghdad, the Mufti was forced again into exile – but not
before he had primed the Arabs of Baghdad to unleash the Farhud of 1941. The pogrom claimed the lives of at least 140 Jews, with many mutilated and raped, and 900 shops looted and wrecked.

Thereafter, the Mufti’s collaboration with the Nazis, despite strenuous Arab efforts
to downplay it, has been well-documented. Taking refuge in Berlin, he
sought Nazi license to exterminate Jews in Arab countries as well as
Palestine “in the same way as the problem was resolved in the Axis
Countries.” He raised a Bosnian Muslim SS division which slaughtered 80
percent of Bosnian Jewry. Before the mass Palestinian exodus, the Arab
League hatched a postwar, coordinated Nuremberg-style plan to persecute their Jewish citizens as enemy aliens.

The Arab League’s decision to launch their
ill-fated 1948 war against the fledgling state of Israel came after
fierce lobbying by the Palestinian Mufti.

No, the Palestinians are not the innocent victims they claim to be.

The Palestinians must face up to their
responsibility not only for driving the conflict with Israel, but
playing their part in the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from the Arab
world – now 50 percent of Israel’s Jewish citizenry. If their choices
have led them down the path of misery and disaster, they have only their
leadership to blame.

6 comments:

I think behind any and every conflict, there lies disturbing history. There are series of unfortunate events, greed and ego of some not so great leaders, which ultimately leads to catastrophe. Holocaust and expulsion of Jews from various countries was one such event.

Today when we look at the problems, all around, we need to learn from the mistakes and never try to repeat it.

This entire region, where once prophets and saints walked in their full glory deserves to be restored to its glorious part, where every body lives in harmony and peace.

So lets pray and wish that this region becomes an epitome of peace and tranquility.

First and above all I want to say may both Husseini and that other nongre rot in their tombe &nd serve as meal to cockroaches and other disgusting elements of corpse eaters.The other thing I want to say is :I marvel that after all that was done to us we are still here!!!That must be a reason for a lot of hatred. But who cares? sultana

Here after a quotation from a WJC Report written in Egypt in 1948: "the great scandal of the mass exodus of Arab Refugees from Palestine, is a situation from which the [Egyptian] government and the King are fully responsible." This WJC quotation appears in page 131 of Prof. Michael Laskier book "The Jews of Egypt 1920-1970".I was only 10 tears old in 1948, but I still remember the big newspapers titles, encouraging the arabs to leave Palestine temporarily, because the Egyptian Air-Force is bombarding Tel-Aviv and all over, so the Arabs could return triumphally later to their homes in Palestine.This WJC quotation, was part of the World Jewish Congress Reports, from their Representatives in Cairo, reporting the very bad situation of Jews in Egypt in 1948, the persecutions, the bombs explosions in the Jewish quarter, the emprisonments, etc. All this in pages 131 and 135 of Prof. Laskier book, where the WJC Reports of 1948 already accused Egypt and the king personnaly, about the exodus of the arabs from Palestine as well as the Jews from Arab Countries persecutions.Something to remember.Levana Zamir

I remember that too!The Palestinians were incited to leave because the Arab armies were going to push the Jews into the sea and then the Palestinians would be free to come back.But things did not turn out as they hoped. Not only did they lose all their battles against the Jews, but they also forced their own people into camps so they could claim their return.et voila: it's a simple storysultana

I find the 15th century Spanish Reconquista an essential concept.Today, many Muslims insist that they conquered Spain in 735AD, and that although they were driven out by Spain by 1492, it remains theirs to reconquer. That's what they are about today having planted one million Arabs and a new mosque recently in Spain. Their idea is similar with respect to Israel: They conquered it in the 7th century and it belongs to them forever and Israel must be driven out. No peace is possible!

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)